We use cookies on our website to enhance your browsing experience. If you continue to use our website you consent to our use of cookies. To change how we use cookies on your device adjust the settings below. To understand more about how we use cookies, or to change your preferences and browser settings at any time, please see our Cookie Notice.

Remember, if you do disable or delete cookies, you may not have access to the full functionality of our website.

This cookie is automatically generated by applications based on the PHP language. This cookie is a general purpose identifier used to maintain user session variables.

Cookie

Name

Purpose

Cookie

_ga, _gcl_au, _gid

Name

Universal Analytics (Google)

Purpose

These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our website. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the website. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the website and blog, where visitors have come to the website from and the pages they visited.

Cookie

BizoID, bcookie, lang, UserMatchHistory, lidc

Name

LinkedIn

Purpose

These are browser ID cookies dropped on our site by LinkedIn. They allow us to track visitor behavior on the LinkedIn campaigns, together with the interactions on our web pages including time spent on the site, how far users scroll down and where they go after this site.

Cookie

Name

Purpose

Cookie

_mkto_trk

Name

Marketo

Purpose

This cookie is set by Marketo. This allows a website to track visitor behavior on the sites on which the cookie is installed and to link a visitor to the recipient of an email marketing campaign, to measure campaign effectiveness. Tracking is performed anonymously until a user identifies himself by submitting a form.

Cookie

Tfw_exp

Name

Twitter

Purpose

Used in conjunction with the Twitter social plugins in order to allow to help Twitter improve and understand how people use its services, including Twitter buttons and widgets, and Twitter Ads.

Share

What You Can’t Do With 1-Gig

Digital service providers know that connectivity alone isn’t all that consumers want.

I think I’ve achieved broadband Nirvana – but it feels remarkably as if nothing much has changed.

I’ve recently subscribed to a fiber-optic Internet service that has a maximum upload and download speed of 1 Gbit/s, and, while my devices and Wi-Fi router can only handle a fraction of that bandwidth, it’s hard to imagine I’ll ever need anything faster.

While it’s great as it is to have that kind of bandwidth on tap, the process of getting connected revealed quite a bit about how service providers, even the ones that sell 1-Gbit/s fiber-optic connections, are struggling to be much more than basic connectivity providers.

In the U.S., especially, cable and telecom operators are spending billions on mergers and acquisitions to control as much of the consumer experience as they can – the connectivity, the content, and the delivery. For those businesses to be true digital service providers (DSPs), they’ll need do more than just provide a lot of services. They will need to know their customer and react with that context in mind each time an interaction occurs.

Today’s Internet innovators are providing that kind of specialized service. They’re nimble, agile companies that can personalize a service, while still offering it at scale and keeping the price competitive. Netflix, in fact, is a good example of the kind of company today’s service providers are being compared to by their customers.

Netflix has amassed 45 million customers in the U.S. alone, making it the nation’s largest video subscription service. The company doesn’t provide the connectivity that powers its video streaming service, nor does it make or sell the devices that deliver it. Instead, Netflix provides great content that’s always available, on any device, and it makes decent recommendations about what to watch next. No cable, satellite or telco pay TV service I’ve ever used has come close to doing all those things well. One of the best things about my new home Internet connection is that Netflix looks better than ever.

The most surprising thing, so far, about having a really high-bandwidth connection is all the stuff you can’t do. When I ordered my 1-Gbit/s home Internet service, my service provider provided a new DVR that recorded and stored more TV shows.

Can I watch this heftier collection of recorded shows on more devices? No, just on the TV. Can I share shows with friends that subscribe to the same pay TV service? No, just use Twitter like everyone else. What if the DVR automatically recorded shows that matched my viewing preferences, just in case I want to watch them? Nice idea but, no, that’s not available. Can I get 4K TV? Not yet.

What else can I do with this bandwidth? Online data backup, of course. I take tons of photos, and I’ve been backing them up on hard drives for years. It’d be great to have copies on a cloud backup service somewhere offsite. The catch? The online backup service I had been using for basic document storage only allowed for uploads at speeds around 1.5 Mbit/s or so, even though I was using a fiber-optic connection. That never mattered before, but it certainly does now. I spent a few hours researching other online backup services and found one that allowed you to upload data at a much faster rate. (Incidentally, Google offers a terabyte of storage for backups with its 1-Gig Internet service.)

A true DSP might have provided a very different experience from the very beginning. A DSP would, for instance, be connected with an ecosystem of service providers that it could recommend for things like online backup that offered speed as well as stability. It might also provide a self-service portal for me to discover and activate new services that would put my faster Internet service to good use.

A true DSP would do more than provide connectivity – it would think about what that connectivity enables me to do, and what I might want to do next. It would provide ways to store, share, and discover new TV shows and movies on whatever device I wanted. It might also make use of virtualized customer premises equipment (vCPE) to turn on cloud-based services for the home: multidevice parental controls, networked DVR, security, device backup, home monitoring and home automation.

I think this is a really interesting snapshot of the current trend: Companies that mostly focus on connectivity are gradually becoming digital service providers. They have a big challenge ahead of them, but by working with the right technology vendors and strategic partners, they can become the kinds of companies that provide networking capabilities and new digital services on demand, at scale and in the cloud.